Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts
Hugh Fitzgerald: “Islamic Modernist” Mustafa Akyol Betrays More of His Worldview Than He Likely Intended (Part 3)
Akyol paints a picture of progress, steady but very slow, in encouraging change in Islam. But in fact, there has been backsliding in the very place where a secular Muslim society had been taken the farthest: Kemalist Turkey. Erdogan turns out to be the anti-Ataturk, he and his aides appearing proudly with their hijabbed wives (one of his ministers is publicly polygamous), singing the praises of Islam, so visibly different in spirit and letter from Ataturk. The re-islamizing of Turkey is most evident in the government’s vastly expanded support for the Imam Hatip (Imam and Preacher) schools. These are schools supported by the state, which provide pupils with a very heavy dose of religious education. Under Erdogan, these schools have multiplied. Support for Imam Hatip upper schools, for boys and girls aged 14 to 18, doubled from 2017 to 6.57 billion lira ($1.68 billion) in 2018 — nearly a quarter of the total upper schools budget. Although the 645,000 Imam Hatip students make up only 11 percent of the total upper school population, they receive 23 percent of funding — double the amount spent per pupil at mainstream schools.
Since 2012, when Imam Hatip education was extended to middle schools for pupils aged 10 to 14, total pupil numbers have risen fivefold, to 1.3 million students in over 4,000 schools. The government intends to complete construction of 128 Imam Hatip upper schools in 2018, and has plans to build a further 50, the budget and investment plans show. Turkey has also increased religious education courses at regular state schools, some of which have been converted into Imam Hatip schools. Religious studies take up about 1/3 of the time in the Imam Hatip schools.
Erdogan has removed all restrictions on wearing the hijab. In the heyday of Kemalism, army recruits who were found reading the Qur’an too diligently were marked — informally — as non-officer material. Now the devout are favored for such promotion. From 2002 to 2013, Erdogan built 17,000 new mosques, some of them mega-mosques. Since 2013, another 8,000 have been built, meaning Erdogan has been responsible for 25,000 new mosques in Turkey. He has also been building huge mosques outside Turkey, including the mega-mosque just opened in Cologne, to serve Turks abroad.
All of this shows how systematically Erdogan is bringing Turkey back to Islam, undoing Ataturk’s legacy every way he can, and paying special attention to the religious education of the young.
Akyol offered a suggestion to begin encouraging this change[emphasizing human rights in Islam].“One way to bring human rights … is to minimize the role of Islamic law and bring secular laws that will establish equality,” he said. “And this has been tried, and it’s worked.”
Yes, it has been tried, and it has worked. But again, only in Turkey. And only temporarily. By the Tanzimat (“reorganization”) reforms in the mid-19th century, the Ottomans did away with the dhimmi status for non-Muslims. Under Ataturk and his epigones, women were given legal equality with men: the right to vote, an end to legal polygyny, equal rights of inheritance, and equal value given to the testimony of women. But nowhere else in the Muslim world, save Turkey, have secular laws established complete equality between men and women, and between Muslim and non-Muslim. In Turkey itself, the systematic undermining of Islam by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk has been reversed. With his vast mosque-building and his expansion of the Imam Hatip religious schools, Erdogan has been molding the minds of the young, and the attitudes of families, to accept the centrality of Islam.
Akyol pointed to the example of Turkey following World War I as an example of how secularization of laws can help modernize societies. Akyol also said the most permanent solution to advancing religious toleration is reinterpreting Sharia and the Quran altogether.’
Secularization after World War I was made possible by a very particular set of circumstances: the disaster of military defeat, and the appearance of a remarkable man, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk. The military defeat meant the breakup and loss of the Ottoman Empire’s lands beyond Anatolia. The “backwardness” of Turkey was associated with a retrograde Islam that some blamed for the Turkish defeat. Ataturk had been a war hero (at Gallipoli) and he was a strong leader who managed to keep Turkish Anatolia together, and did not yield, despite Allied pressure, on the question of an independent Kurdistan. He was always a committed secularist, and the laws he passed helped, in Akyol’s phrase, to “modernize [Turkish] society.” But Ataturk was unique — there have been no other successful reforming Ataturks in Muslim countries. And even Ataturk’s reforms turned out not to be permanent. For what Ataturk did is being methodically undone by Erdogan.
“Another approach is to reinterpret Sharia, and that’s what I’m interested in because once you push the religious convictions aside for secular institutions, they’re still there,” [Akyol] said. “They will want to come back, and there will be a tension between them and the secular space.”
How can one “reinterpret” Sharia, based as it is on the immutable texts of the Qur’an, that come straight from Allah, and from stories in the Hadith where Muhammad’s words and deeds have been dutifully recorded, and long ago were ranked according to their “authenticity” by hadith scholars?
It would be most useful if Mustafa Akyol could offer us a few examples of the kind of re-interpretation of Qur’anic verses he has in mind, and above all, how he thinks one and a half billion devout Muslims can be made to accept, and to believe in, such reinterpretation. Ataturk, the only successful modernizer of a Muslim society, did not “re-interpret” the Qur’an and hadith; he rode roughshod over them.
“The best way to go about reinterpreting the Quran is through historicism, which focuses on divine intent in the context of the work’s initial production, Akyol said.“God spoke not in a vacuum, he spoke in a context, in a society that had a culture,” he said. “Therefore, when you look at the Qur’an, you should look at the divine intent and you should bring it to today with the impact but not the social context.”
“Historicism” here is simply a different name for historical context. What Akyol is suggesting is what small armies of Muslim apologists have been relying on for years. Whenever a particularly disturbing and violent Qur’anic verse is brought to their attention — say, 2:191-193, 4:89, 8:12, 8:60, 47:4 — they claim it must be understood as applying only in its “historical context.” These verses are meant, they insist, not to apply to all enemies of Muslims for all time, but only to particular enemies at a certain time and place, 1,400 years ago. These apologists don’t believe this themselves but, well-versed in taqiyya, they want you to believe it.
Mustafa Akyol wants Muslims to start putting the Qur’anic verses into the “context” for which he claims they were meant. They should look at the “divine intent” — when Allah said to “kill all the Infidels,” he was not saying to “kill all the Infidels” whenever and wherever you can. His real intention, the “divine intent” he was conveying, was that Muslims, in 7th century western Arabia, should kill this or that particular group of non-Muslims. “Context.” You must feel better already.
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